There appears to be a bit of a gap between first and third in the West.

Making a mockery of their rodeo road trip, the San Antonio Spurs rode into town and corralled the Clippers every which way in their 116-90 thrashing Thursday night at Staples Center.

As the NBA trading deadline passed quietly, the Clippers were even more quiet, which may have been a disconcerting reflection that they couldn't pull anything off to get closer to the Spurs.

"It was a complete ass-kicking from the start in every way you can count," Clippers coach Vinny Del Negro said. "We didn't bring the effort, the intensity, the mindset tonight to compete at the level you need to against a team like that."

If it wasn't over at halftime - and a 15-point San Antonio lead made a pretty good case that it was - a 34-21 pummeling in the third quarter drove it home.

The Spurs led by 34 at one point.

Tony Parker scored 14 of his 31 points in the third period and got out of Dodge, just like many of the fans, as the Spurs (44-12) won their fifth consecutive game. They've won six of seven on their nine-game road trip.

"They beat us bad," said Clippers guard Chris Paul, who went from All-Star Game MVP to four points and three assists in 27 minutes on Thursday. "Luckily this wasn't Game 7 or our last game of the season. They came out, they executed, Tony was in a rocking chair all night. We let him go wherever he wanted to. It shows we've got to get back to work.

"The thing about our team is we've been through adversity, we've bounced back. We've seen rougher times. It's one game, and nobody around here is going to hang our head."

The Clippers (39-18), enjoying the best season in their history, had beaten San Antonio twice in November and were poised to make a run at them in the final 26 games, but they were never given a chance.

The Spurs began the dismantling of the Clippers right away by making 14 of 21 shots in the first quarter to take a 34-21 lead.

San Antonio was still shooting 63.2 percent by halftime and took a 58-43 lead to the locker room as the Clippers made only 9 of 25 shots in the second period, and Parker had 17 of his points by then.

Danny Green added 15 points, Tiago Splitter and Manu Ginobili had 10 each and 13 different players scored for the Spurs, who shot 58.9 percent for the game.

Blake Griffin scored 17 points to lead the Clippers, who shot only 42.1 percent and gave up 46 points in the paint. It often didn't take more than one pass for the Spurs to get a layup.

"Everybody struggled," Del Negro said. "Not one person played well, not one person I thought played hard and we didn't play well together as a team like we usually do at any end of the court.

"Then guys started forcing things to try and get us back in, and we could never make any runs because we could never slow them down."

Needless to say, an inevitable sense of frustration began to build.

Already down by 15, the Spurs quickly had a 20-point lead when DeAndre Jordan picked up a technical foul, and the Clippers got another technical for their second delay-of-game call. Parker made both free throws, but Tim Duncan followed with two missed foul shots.

Jordan couldn't control the rebound on the second miss, Paul dealt Parker a hard foul and Parker made two free throws and suddenly it was 71-49. And climbing.

"We could have done a better job, I could have done a better job," Griffin said. "It gets frustrating, but we have to be better. There's going to be games where you feel like nothing's going your way and you have not give up a point here or there on technicals or whatever it was.

"It's kind of one of those games, and you can't let that affect how you talk to officials or small things like that. You've just got to keep playing and we didn't do a good job of that, I didn't do a good job of that."

The Clippers promised changes begin this morning.

"I know we'll be better the next game," Griffin said. "I know that for a fact because of the way we'll come in to practice, we're going to set the tone early. We're going to have a good practice and that will get us out of it."